By Jan Werts’s calculation, next week’s meeting of EU leaders in Brussels (19-20 June) will be the 132nd such summit since 1957. The European Council was given formal status at the ninth of these summits – as late as December 1974. Those who have known the EU only since May 2004 (for the sake of historically significant example) might struggle to imagine the EU without its relentless schedule of twice-yearly, then thrice-yearly and now four-times-a-year summits. Werts himself has less difficulty: a Dutch journalist, he first began writing about the EU in 1967 and he has been working in Brussels since the 1970s. The reader may sense an undertone of regret for the days of the founding six member states, when the European Council did not exist and the Community Method – that sacred triangle of the European Commission, the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament – prevailed.

The EU’s play-maker

Now is a good time to ask questions about the emergence of the European Council as the EU’s play-maker. A sequence of three summits in 2007 – June in Brussels, October in Lisbon and December back in Brussels – set in place the Treaty of Lisbon, on which the Irish electorate is voting today (12 June). Most obviously, if the treaty is ratified, it will give the European Council a permanent president and secretariat – an idea rejected in 1974. But there are other significant changes too. The strengthening of the General Affairs Council (a formation of the Council of Ministers) vis-à-vis the other sectoral councils ought, theoretically, to relieve the European Council of being the arbiter when the Council of Ministers has shirked or failed its duties.

Missed opportunity

Yet although the book is timely – the text was completed in January 2008 – it is a missed opportunity. Werts sets out to ask the question: who leads the European Union? But he adds an important subsidiary question: how does the European Council operate in practice (my emphasis)? Oddly, for a journalist, he pays too little attention to what happens, while becoming caught up in the theory of law and political science (this book has its origins in a 1991 doctoral thesis).

Take, by way of example, his cursory treatment of the Hampton Court summit of October 2005. Perhaps because it was only an informal meeting, Werts gives it scant attention (four scattered references: of which one is in a footnote and one in an annex listing the meetings). But further consideration of that informal gathering might have thrown up insights into that question of how summits operate (or do not operate) in practice. It was a deliberate attempt by the UK, which held the presidency of the Council of Ministers, to do something different from the usual European Council. It was a bid to get back to pre-1974 informality. The bag-carriers and officials were excluded from the meeting-room (indeed, most of them were excluded from the palace). It was an attempt, pace the 2004 enlargement, to bring summits down to size. Werts makes the point that preparations for Hampton Court bypassed the usual route – the committee of ambassadors to the EU and the Council of Ministers. But he does not go on to ask what difference that made. Hampton Court was informal, yet produced a shift in thinking on energy policy which the European Commission has been exploiting ever since. Another point of wider import was that Josep Borrell, then the president of the European Parliament, at the invitation of the UK, sat through the whole meeting – whereas at European Councils proper, the president of the Parliament gets to speak at the beginning and is then dismissed. It was an interesting precedent, but Werts ignores the point when he comes to write about the balance of power between the European Council and the Parliament.

Similarly, when writing about relations between the European Council and the European Commission, he leaves on one side the extent to which Jacques Delors, as Commission president, shaped the outcome, using his relationship with France and Germany.

It is this insensitivity to human and institutional dynamics that makes this book such a frustrating read. Here is Werts on the disastrous European Council of December 2003: “[Silvio Berlusconi] with the Constitutional Treaty at stake after a night of haggling, closed the meeting before time, but with good reason. Berlusconi sensed perfectly that it was still too early for a compromise.” Well, that is one reading, so why did EU leaders see things differently?

According to Werts, the European Council in Berlin in 1999 was “a three-fold success”. Students of how European Councils work in practice might miss that reform of the milk regime was delayed and that in Cologne three months later the appointment of Pierre de Boissieu as deputy secretary-general of the Council of Ministers was railroaded through by Franco-German diktat. Werts’s take on another Chirac-Schröder deal, their October 2002 agreement on agricultural spending, announced just hours before a European Council, is that: “For the umpteenth time, the Franco-German ‘engine’ had protected the European Council from failure.” Put another way: the summit was pre-empted by two of the large member states.

The book is a less than gripping read, not helped by what might be the after-effect of reading too many European Council conclusions: the prose-style is leaden and imprecise.

One can see why John Harper Publishing wanted to have a book on the European Council in its catalogue. It fills a gap, since there are already titles on the European Commission, the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament. The latter two have been through more than one edition. But even if the Lisbon treaty is ratified, this book on the European Council is unlikely to stand the test of time. It will be bettered.